Spelling

 

1.     Thunderstorms over Victoria have inspired many people to declare they see lightening. The sky has been lightened up, ever so temporarily, but what they see is lightning. My primary school teacher drew a jagged line between these two false friends on the blackboard: lightening/lightning. The population seems, on the evidence, to be divided on this matter. Fortunately, none of my friends say lightening, but social media friends could lighten my load by appreciating that thunder follows lightning, at a space of five seconds per mile.

2.     There are people out there who, in a fit of Horatian zeal, would sieze the day. They are not sizing the day, they are seizing it. We are besieged on all sides by these well-meaning friends, who prefer to say beseiged. Should we be full of understanding? They have brains like a sieve, who cannot recall that the simple order of letters never included seive. It’s weird; or as their spellchecker warns them against, wierd. It grieves me, but is it my problem or theirs? My dainty corrections on their Reply lines could reap the whirlwind. But then what are freinds for?

3.     My teacher drew an ice-block on the blackboard next to the word ‘practice’ and the letters ‘is’ next to ‘practise’. This was his mnemonic for permanently distinguishing between the noun (an ice-block is an object) and the verb (‘is’ is is). Not all friends on social media were taught this lesson at an early age and it shows. They have not been helped by people in the United States who gave up the practice of practise some time ago, preferring ice-blocks on most occasions. Not that Americans are consistent in this respect, as we witness each day when they go online. Do they like being different, or have they just never been told? ‘Practise’ is one of many examples where Australians remain decidedly British in their preferences, but not all Australians. Practice makes perfect.

4.     Have I mentioned accommodate? The population could be doing a lot better with accommodate, though admittedly double double-letter words still cause us to reach for the dictionary. How many occassions has that occured?  We cannot underate the confusions friends get into trying to be sucessful with succesful, or their permutations of something as simple as a reccomendation.

5.     From time to time I lose it when I see people on social media complain how their team looses all the time. Am I the only person who loses it in this way? Should I hang loose, make a few shaka signs with my hands and move on? It raises personal questions that go way back, about meaning what you say and saying what you mean, about spelling being my favourite subject at school. It’s not enough to be loose with language, you could lose the plot, you could lose your credibility. Not that I go looking for false friends, they seem to find me and all I can do is monitor the situation and get right my own judgement of them. Remain loose. Don’t lose it!          

Nation

 

On this Day we are asked to celebrate and make penance and protest and mourn. The Day is neither festival nor fast. It commemorates a process of takeover that was one of the easiest prizes of Empire. The outline of the prize had not been full mapped at the time. The Day claimed a terra nullius, a nothing everything, the scale and richness and mystery and humanity of which it was ignorant. It was a chance moment, a peculiar occasion obscure on a shoreline impossibly remote from the education and sensuality and affections of those in attendance. On that, as it were, first Day there was no call for celebration or penance or protest or mourning. On that Day the calendar was introduced into an island continent, the place that was still incomplete outlines to those lined up to salute, unchained or chained. It takes a lot of ink to make calendars. They are rigorously speckled with new year celebrations and monarchical birthdays and Whitsunday passages. Their grids are reminiscent of longitude and latitude, and do not instantly raise affections. The sense that one day is much the same as any other day is easy to feel as we look upon those 365 empty squares, though 1788 was a leap year. It is similar to the overlay of grids on land outlines where there is, theoretically at least, nothing there. Terra nullius is not interested in our affections. It does not argue for celebrations or penance or protest or mourning. It ignores the shapes of things as they are, and to come. On that Day certain unchained leaders drew from their coat-pockets and carry-cases the very solid notion they called nation. Nation had never been so much as an outline for those who had lived for hundreds of years in this newly visited remote place, long before the Day commemorated in this report. Or rather than report, we could call it an aesthetics. For example, Spain is frequently an object of address amongst Spanish poets. They address Spain as though Spain were a person for whom they will sacrifice everything. Spain gets stacked up with prize attributes as though Spain were a god, or a bullfighter, or a pulchritudinous woman. An ode to Spain may go through every affection in the dictionary. This is not the kind of poetry addressed, on the Day, to the outline later named Australia. There is normally a terra nullius of poetry addressed to Australia. Anything said in that mode is likely to be ironical, or so laconic as to be soundless. Words of celebration and penance and protest and mourning occur around the edges of the Day, poetry not being as loud as sound systems or talkback opinions or outboard motors or maskless beer-gardens, or we could go on. Whereas, what are the right words for the Day, if only private thankyous and individual sorrys and quiet rebukes and whispering losses?

Mendacity

 

Photograph: a sign in my doctor’s clinic when I went for the booster last Wednesday.

 Now, let me get this right. When you say ‘The people incarcerated in that hotel are not refugees’, you don’t mean they’re not refugees. They are not refugees, based on the argument that you are who you are, the person with his picture everywhere, the person expected to explain to the populace what is the case. Next week, or next year, your picture will not be everywhere, no one will care what you say about anything, and the refugees will still be refugees, possibly still incarcerated, possibly still in a hotel. To the best of your knowledge at the time, this was probably the case. When you say ‘The people incarcerated are on a pathway somewhere’, you don’t mean they are on a pathway, you mean they are incarcerated in a hotel. Last week you said they were not refugees, only to backtrack and deny you had said that, or had said that but not meant it to sound the way it sounded, and that what you meant by refugees then probably isn’t what you mean by refugees now, because the whole thing is, it’s not what you say but that you could be talking to a blind bat, or the King of Spain, or a journalist who will write down anything you say, or a lamppost, even. Not that you are listening to anything I say; I may as well be talking to a lamppost myself. To the best of your knowledge, that’s what you thought refugee meant at the time, which might possibly be different again from what you meant by refugee one year ago, or mean by refugee sometime in the near future, when your picture has vanished from the gaze of the populace, or say in ten minutes. Given that a time will come when you no longer talk to journalists, or intelligent politicians, or autocues, a time when your picture will no longer be seen daily, or at all much, anywhere, it’s hard to know whether you understand your own system of refugee incarceration, or the difference between a refugee and a champion tennis player. Even when you’re the person in the picture primarily responsible for the incarceration of refugees. Summer will pass. Perhaps the only important thing is that it’s you saying those refugees are not refugees, and not someone else. Pathways are pathways, hotels are hotels, rules are rules. Personally, I am fairly indifferent to your picture every day, the square jaw, the square suit, the square autocue, and all the rest of you, the lies and denial of lies for example. Like the rest of the populace I will not miss the picture everywhere once it’s no longer there, or the lies. My attention is caught by those who actually say ‘I am a refugee’, as they sit in a hotel where they have been incarcerated for years. I find it difficult, very difficult, to imagine what that is like. Nor do I expect most journalists to have much of an idea, either. I cannot imagine it has crossed your mind much, who can say when a refugee isn’t a refugee.  

 

 

Revenge

 

The erstwhile president has a wooden leg. Not Obama, who from a straight standing position can slam a basketball into the hoop from the other end of the court; Trump. He does nine-holes with his wooden leg in the mini-golf room of Mar-a-Lago; it’s a feat. Footage shows him limping places, material that eventually will appear in the Netflix documentary ‘History’s Best Kept Secrets’. That could be a little while coming. Rumour mingles with innuendo mingles with bad disco that he lost his leg during a series of ‘The Apprentice’ reality TV show, the one where guests went to an undisclosed maritime location to harpoon an albino whale. The whole series was never put to air. Producers are tight-lipped; their lawyers are light tipped. Psychiatrists, cleverly disguised as wealthy wrestling enthusiasts, who are close to the man they call the Great White God (GWG), say he conflates all kinds of things with the whale, as though they were the same thing. These include comedians who make fun of him; liberals, whom he derides with the collective name ‘Gregory Peck’; and anybody in general who disagrees with him or has crossed his path. They are all ‘bad people’. Much cussing and cursing and golden showers are sprayed in their direction. But that is mere noise to precede his real intention, which is to kill the white whale, whatever it takes. No lie is too big, no plan too piddly, that it will not be implemented for revenge at having to wear a secret prosthetic. His crew are all creeds, colours, all of that stuff, includes anyone who can serve as a means to one end: his revenge. Expendability is an option, with many jumping ship before committing the unthinkable. Collateral damage? What other kind of damage is there? With eye firmly on the whale, the GWG launches forth in some direction or other, a leader relying on others to read compasses and redraw maps to his personal worldview. Irony mixes with historical awareness mixes with Andy Warhol day-glo highlighters when his psychiatrists call him GWG in confidential emails. What to do? It’s difficult to interview someone who answers questions with half-hour speeches unconnected to the question. Hard to analyse someone whose free association balloons into talk bubbles big as a white whale. Awkward conversing with someone who threatens to fire them if they don’t get back to the main subjects of all-in wrestling and how best to aim a harpoon. His crew speak in cadences biblical; he uttereth in words baleful and bilious. Dr Queequeg’s Casebook notes: ‘GWG- easily bruised ego- Melania once called him Stump.’ They are in uncharted waters. The Pequod is all they have, this is not reality TV anymore, and they could go to the bottom, Barack Obama, Stephen Colbert, Gregory Peck, Andy Warhol, Dr. Queequeg, Melania Knauss, and all.

Flowering

 

Bendigo, where I was born, had old streets that were planted out with flowering gums. View Street in Bendigo was most memorable in this regard, a broad street with Edna Walling-like roadsides where red flowering gums and pink grew at spacious distances from one another, up the hill and down the slope again. At least, so my memory visualises, in enriched images. That’s where we visited family friends the Raggatts in their 1880s villa and made childish imitations of tennis on their weed-inflected court. Tea poured from the pot like endless conversation. Traces of gold were about the place. But my strongest memory is not sound or smell, it’s the vision of flowering gums in View Street, because their colours were deep and vibrant across the red of the spectrum, mostly more like orange than actual red, in large bursts against the dark green leaves. Sometimes people called them box gums, who were not experts in eucalypts, and we called them box gums as well as flowering gums, though flowering gums was the common expression. They were shady at midday. They turned heavy at evening, masses of orange and vermillion as the sun settled and all the other colours deepened and cooled. There was green and gold and pale blue. Most memorably, flowering gums were old. They felt old to look at, carried ancient time in their bearing, rested in the earth as if forever. They were before time and certainly before any of us. My head was filled with the weight of their colours in the softening light. The flowering gum in our front garden in Sinclair Crescent has come into bloom. We know this from the early morning rainbow lorikeets, who are louder, livelier and funnier than any breakfast radio hosts. They don’t laugh at their own jokes, either. After the birds disperse for other cafés in the area, the bees arrive in numbers, clustering over the clusters with their hungry hum. Um that one hmmmmm! Given all eucalypts flower, it is a question why our recent ancestors called these gums ‘flowering’. Perhaps the answer is obvious, given they are the most obvious flowering eucalypts in view, in the street. Their sudden efflorescence in bright sunshine stays in the memory. Our heads are filled with the lightness of their colours in the harsh light. Or even at evening there is no other colour like them, anywhere in sight. Eucalyptus ficifolia, as our recent ancestors would have said, though the leaves look nothing like fig leaves; or today, corymbia ficifolia. The renaming of large ranges of eucalyptus to corymbia has not helped the amateurs, those who would imitate the knowhow of Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller KCMG, and who might be happier, though not as happy as lorikeets and bees, by just staying with ‘flowering’.

Tea

 

Weak black, no sugar. When asked, that’s what I order, though weak does not mean cat piss but properly drawn tea that is not too strong. Too strong means it veers towards stewed. That’s the distinction. Even though this has been the way I have taken tea since about 19, my mother still asks how do I take tea; perhaps she asks because that’s just what you do, whether you know the answer or not. When George Orwell says “one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea” in his essay ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ (1946) he unwittingly shows that he still lives in the capital of the then British Empire, where nice tea is Indian by definition; it must be brewed in a china teapot, not an urn, nor something silver or enamel. I began drinking tea black no milk when someone explained that the Chinese never take milk because how else can you appreciate the leaf. Orwell’s Anglocentrism would say that “China tea has virtues … but there is not much stimulation in it.” A visit to T2 and other outlets wall-to-wall with every tea in creation, including every kind of China tea, would possibly have changed Orwell’s mind. My biggest impression of Orwell’s essay, which is more like a recipe, is that it spells out how nearly everyone in my childhood followed this ritual practice, with only very minor variations of taste, making me wonder if Orwell was the populariser of this standard English procedure, or was simply the first person to articulate its finer points. Warm the pot first, spoon the tea straight into the pot, take the teapot to the kettle, and pour the boiling water directly onto the leaves. He may be the author of ‘1984’ while having his own assumptions that ‘rules are rules’. Critically, for those who take milk, Orwell has the tea going in first, then the milk; he’s not a miffy. He calls this step controversial amongst tea drinkers, therefore an argument I can happily avoid, though I agree on principle about skimming off the cream. He then throws fuel on the fire by insisting that tea “should be drunk without sugar.” It’s a Cecily-Gwendolen thing, indubitably. I agree with Orwell, millions wouldn’t, though with chai I have both milk and honey. Such is his insistence on what is nice, he would presumably decry the French and their wedge of lemon, or the Australians with their Antipodean affectation, the gumleaf. Orwell might be the fusspot of the teapot, but he speaks from limited choice. Indian tea must have given a necessary lift to those enduring rations and austerity measures. Little England was kept mildly sedated by tea for generations, especially through the golden age of the tea-chest and tea clipper. Still is. I think, in passing, what would he make of bubble tea, those tall cylinders crowded with tapioca pearls, sucked through a glass straw? It would possibly be all science fiction for Orwell.  

Photograph: detail of one of our many teacups, this one Royal Devonshire. Here is George Orwell’s essay, which can be enjoyed and comparative notes made:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/a-nice-cup-of-tea/

 

Empty

 

Bentleigh: lonely streets - QR squares along the length of platforms – big skies – three passengers per carriage – eyes averted. McKinnon: apartment building sites – ‘You must wear a face mask while travelling’ – empty platform - empty coffee cups. Ormond: ‘It’s never okay to abuse transport staff’ – a seat of girls read their phones – ‘Lift to Way Out’. Glenhuntly: palm tree colonnades – supermarket trolleys abandoned on nature strips – ‘Boom gates gone by 2023’ – tram square rumble. Caulfield: empty shops – empty university – empty racecourse – empty windows – empty CCTV. Malvern: sunburnt agapanthus – arduous ramps – ‘Please don’t run in the station’ – masks under chins – pigeons cooling heels wait for crumbs. Armadale: construction zone – empty café – dead plants in bluestone planters. Toorak: someone who looks a bit like Frida Kahlo – cactus flowers – oleander explosions. Hawksburn: bird on a wire – message on overhead ‘Remember to keep Covid safe.’ South Yarra: Metro trackwork mazes – empty apartments – ‘Get our app’ – more chinless wonders. Richmond: ‘Find out if these disruptions affect you.’ – someone who looks a bit like Ho Chi Minh reads his phone with his index finger – ‘Exit major sporting events only’. Flinders Street: shadowy figures – concourse crisscross - closed takeaways – ‘There has been a platform change.’ – full screen pixel adverts. Southern Cross: ‘Authorised officers travel on this vehicle.’ Flagstaff: someone looking a bit like Dennis Lillee readjusts his mask. Melbourne Central: Mr. No Mask Ghetto Blaster finally exits. Parliament: ‘We’re deep-cleaning and disinfecting this vehicle every day.’ Jolimont: rolling advertisements going nowhere. West Richmond: empty offices – full-blown oleanders. North Richmond: red bin yellow bin red bin yellow bin – someone who looks a bit like Linda McCartney sleeps on a bench out of the sun. Collingwood: surgical masks abandoned on empty platform – timeless townhall clock. Victoria Park: temporary fencing – empty grandstands – moderate freeway. Clifton Hill: huddle of ticket inspectors – ‘Keep your distance where you can’ – traffic movie Hoddle Street. Westgarth: florid graffiti – unattended mirrors. Dennis: gum leaves carpet – brown dawdling dog sniffs about. Fairfield: shopping trolleys dead on their sides – outdated Christmas decorations. Alphington: hot red glare – level crossing clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang. Darebin: ramshackle building site – empty waiting room. Ivanhoe: corona crossword puzzle QR codes on railings – coughing behind masks – ‘No smoking’. Eaglemont: sunburnt shrubbery – empty public phone booth.

Visa

 

Come to think of it, we are each after a visa, though our visas vary. What we wouldn’t give sometimes to get out of where we are now into the place we think we want to be, if only we had the visa. Our dissatisfaction, our wanderlust, our special-based needs are such as to be out of here, and over there, as soon as the visa is approved and stamped. Paradise, even a little paradise, becomes available, once we have signed the papers and smiled for the visa camera. Our minds sprout heavenly thoughts. Even a season in hell seems preferable, it seems, for some of us, if only the visa came through, and why is the postal service so slow these days? We should be at the front of the queue. Surely the mail is more efficient in that coveted place we will arrive at shortly. Everything will be different and new on the other side. Some of us would go to any lengths for a visa. Tall stories, dubious signatories, family connections, funny money. For some, fame is sufficient. For others, hunger and thirst are no obstacle. When it finally arrives we bend the visa, flap it, sniff to test it’s real. We make joking remarks about the selfie attached: not my best side. The visa is ours by rights. The world owes us a visa. How can we be truly ourselves without one? Now that we have one. The visa opens vistas. Soon we can step away from the predictable world of home towards the Paradise where our greatest dreams are rewarded. The very name of our destination becomes a synonym for Paradise, in our dreamy heads. We can make new memories, there in that place where our egos are placated, fantasies are fulfilled, and self-serving is a whole way of life. There we can become king of the world, or just blend in with the crowd. We keep our visa close to our hearts and stride like champions into the future. The past is another country, the one that issued our visa. Cancellation of our visa, refusal of our great desire, seems implausible. Surely a person with our kind of credentials should just stroll through the customs gate. These stuck-up bureaucrats with their tiny-minded rules are not mentioned in the tourist brochures. Lonely Planet draws a blank. This would never happen at home, least of all to someone like me. We can choose our moment to read the small print. A visa is a visa. Rules are rules. Money is funny. Hell sounded interesting, before we arrived there. In the detainment room we have hours to study our visa. Tennis, anyone? Who is that person in the selfie? Some of us would go to extraordinary lengths to get a better idea. Others wait for the phone call from their lawyer. As there’s nothing else to do for now, we read the local newspapers, but their opinions seem like they come from another world.

Screen

 

Unsure what to do with my line ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen’, I ask Text Generation (TG). Here’s my first return: ‘I'm screen-screen-screen. You screen, my screen. Let's screen! (Gimme that screen! I need screens! Screen, I need for screens. Screen?) We take the screen. I need for screens. You screen, move for screen, you watch screen, or you screen, which, as before, we should watch. Screen? screen? screen? screen?)’ Repetitive, you would have to agree. A little hysterical, a touch unhinged? It’s unusable. Entering the line again TG had this to say: ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen. I'm a great filmmaker. I look at these images and see the great people in those films. The other movie came out last year and, just like that, gave us a glimpse into a world where the movie world never was, or was not. What caught my attention is how one person even put it this way.’ Our great filmmaker goes on in this fashion for some hours, before clearing the room. TG has trouble constructing a logical argument. Whatever you ask, it replies in the voice of a California dropout who’s tripped once too often. ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen, and for the phone of my friend, and it's the only screen I get, and I'm like, I don't get it, it's bad. I do get it, and my friend does, and now I get it in my head, but I'm not in the frame of mind, I'm not in the head of reality. Which, I mean, it's very frustrating, because I'm trying to take full control of the timeline while being really on the phone, and that gets me very frustrated because I always want to have that real life.’ This is not Hemingway, or Beckett even. I’m out of sympathy with TG. Its grammar is a disgrace, ditto its work schedule: ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen, I just work, all over the place, with great things happening with my time, with my life. The only way to live your life the way you want to is to live it up, and that's just because you're not the only person who does that. I'll go home today like 15 hours after I hit sleep, I'm really good at sleeping. The only other time I've slept is because I had to get my clothes cleaned up before I hit sleep.’ Really? Time to read a good book and trust my own instincts. Diagnosis: TG lacks humour, indeed is relentlessly serious, has no emotional sense whatsoever. TG is a limited source for poetic activity; it’s word-wallpaper. TG uses the first personal singular but has no self. I prefer imagination, a good conversation, anything rather this: ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen. With those words we started to see the real world, from the human eye like the sky. On top of that, the two worlds were just as close, because each one had a world of its own. The two worlds were identical in size and shape, except for a tiny feature. We saw very little else. They each had their own unique names.’ TG needs to go on a long holiday, preferably to a world other than this one. It talks too much about nothing. It does my head in. I’m over it.

Tennis

 

Here are words of Thomas Traherne (‘Centuries’, I 22) on insatiableness: “Thus men get one Hundred Pound a year that they may get another; and having two covet Eight, and there is no End of all their Labor; becaus the Desire of their Soul is Insatiable. Like Alexander the Great they must hav all: and when they hav got it all be quiet. And may they not do all this before they begin? Nay it would be well, if they could be Quiet. But if after all, they shall be like the stars, that are seated on high, but hav no Rest, what gain they more, but Labor for their Trouble? It was wittily fained that that Yong man sate down and Cried for more Worlds. So insatiable is Man that Millions will not Pleas him. They are no more then so many Tennis-Balls, in comparison of the Greatness and Highness of his Soul.” Written soon after the end of the English Civil War, Traherne questions the whole endeavour of fighting for land, or wanting to be a millionaire. He has observed and knows personally that humans are insatiable. But rather than judging, Traherne’s argument is that we could use our insatiability for godly rather than worldly and selfish pursuits. For him this is, as he puts it, true nobility. The Puritans were against tennis. The main reasons given were that it was a ball game, thus leading to vice and violence; that ‘people like us’ could be enticed to play the game on Sunday, instead of resting; and that it was a game played exclusively in Continental Catholic monarchical courts. Did the game not originate in the monasteries? Enough said. Royal, or Real, tennis was not the same as modern lawn tennis. It was not played by ‘people like us’. It was elitist. Imagine, nations could come to blows over tennis. Leaders might exchange a to-and-fro of words, send dispatches, employ lawyers, engage in coverups. It was a symbol of oppression. It could get right out of hand. The whole universe could end up filled with whirling tennis balls. In a word, insatiable. How then do we read Traherne? Given his happy nature, we can imagine him playing royal tennis. Surely even tennis has its own felicitous place in the order of existence. Youth may be recalled, a tonic for the weekend. And he has an eye for detail. What’s all the racket? He doesn’t see the point in going to a court of law, or war, over more tennis balls. To enunciate these meditations to some purpose, his writing is full of sallies, lobs, aces, and the occasional well-timed forehand smash. What’s the issue, in comparison with the greatness and highness of our souls?, he asks. Enough said.    

 

Artichoke

The psychology of the artichoke pours over. Says, put your mind towards yourself. Make it a perfect one, a more perfect one, a not less perfect one. Outside yes; meanwhile, inside. Put my spirit back into the world. Leave these thoughts that you once had. Peel back the leaves. Put my soul back into the world. The colour of the artichoke in summer is purple and green. This is gorgeous, or not quite as gorgeous. The purple and green are frequently somewhat dull. It has a little yellow. It definitely should be listed as a high quality. The colour really does take up more of the space, made by Anonymous from good size, but not always as good as expected. Sometimes, more so. It's already a little too large in diameter to hold more for any sort of bundled collection. Last time they were more mauve. The anatomy of the artichoke is the heart. We have words for them. Latin, Mandarin. How is an artichoke heart made up of two halves of two brains? The artichoke heart is a bird. Can you believe they are as soundless in the middle of the woods or in a creek? The language of the artichoke, at least the language of this artichoke, is an edited rewrite of text generated by, not Anonymous but Artificial Intelligence. One reason for this involves the desire to make as much sense as possible. As much sense as text generation affords. Sentience intervened at critical moments. The language of the artichoke follows its own rules for how to be readable, simple syntax guidelines, and whatever signifiers the online signifier signified. Who owns it? The mistranslation of artichoke makes it an ancient fish found in ancient Japan. It is known as a bird-like fernfish. The artichoke has never been held in captivity. The fernfish had its own unspecified diet. It's a rare feat to find a fernfish, either in water or fossilised stone. The physics of the artichoke and all other great art forms is not like a decorative ornament. But ego decided upon its own ‘method’. Ego began to build a whole philosophy around it. This ‘method’ acted to unbaggage what is life for; what happens when, before and after, what is consumed by a stream of life and then a stream of death; and how artichokes relate to each other, and us. The astronomy of the artichoke is addressed in a series of 18 papers, the largest ever to be published, entitled, ‘Artichoke Astronomy of the World’, edited by Professore Riccardo Azzuro. They were Earth-based observations carried out by the Royal Astronomical Society, first published in 1838, 1839, 1842, 1843 and 1844. Supernovas, purple and green. More and more people are taking up the science and looking to take part in it to see if it will make a difference. Dr J. K. Ruck, a British space scientist in India, who has studied the subject, says: "As people continue to learn about the universe, we learn to be more concerned for the welfare of our planet, the health of our species, and in other areas of our lives."

Stranger

 

I, for one, never open ‘shared memories’ on social media. The idea of a machine managing how I remember is insulting, ludicrous, disturbing, [deleted]. I stare at the invitation to a ‘shared memory’ with suspicion, suspicion redoubled each time new ones confront me on screen. I prefer the memories I have already, of friends and acquaintances the computer pretends to know something about. The computer is a stranger. It is a difficult and unpleasant and unholy stranger at such moments. My wish is that this offensive interloper would lope off to another table at the internet café and bloody well mind it’s own [deleted] business. This creep wants to hand around pictures of me having a good time with people it doesn’t know about anymore than it knows me. Is it any of its business to be [deleted] flashing these pictures about the place for anyone to make comments about? It has no way of distinguishing a boundary. Its own memory seems incapable of separating the living from the dead. Do I even need to be reminded of this ‘shared memory’, which could inspire unhappiness as much as its intention, hey-ho happiness? This stranger in my life lacks emotional intelligence. No one can get close. I doubt if assistance from sentient humans will help this [deleted] useless maze of electronics with emotions, now or anytime in the future. Sometimes I wonder what ‘shared memory’ the stranger tempts me with in this impersonal, unholy way. But it doesn’t matter, because clicking its [deleted] link is the last thing on my mind. I’m already thinking my own memories of this friend or acquaintance, real in my own mind, where I can think about them in every direction time has to offer. Fondness is a word. I will not be locked into this stranger’s version of me. Yet every time, as I communicate to my friends and acquaintances bless them!, I add more information to this monster, information it’s programmed to return to sender in ‘shared memories’. I begin to wonder what kind of relationship I have got myself into. This was not what I had in mind when I logged in to this arrangement, enticing as it was to socialise remotely, daily pictures thrown in. No warning then about entering into a false friendship with an algorithmic accident of the age. Anyway, a mirage. Because, after all, reality is preferable. The reality of flesh and blood people reading this rarified rant, people like you, friendly reader of rants. The illusion of a ‘shared memory’, what does it share? Like dreams or reflections in a mirror, I must consciously differentiate these ‘shared memories’ from the immediate and pleasant and holy memories of my own mind. Though even these are internal images and not the people I speak to, eat with, play with, embrace and kiss even, depending on who they are. Thank you for your time.  

Property

 

Reading Thomas Traherne (ca. 1637-1674), astonished both at what I read and that, in fact, I am reading him at all. His masterpiece ‘Centuries of Meditations’ was only found, in manuscript form, in a London street-barrow in 1896. The single manuscript of his ‘Commentaries of Heaven’ was rescued from burning in a Lancashire rubbish tip about 1967, donated to the Library of the University of Toronto after a scholar identified it as Traherne, then bought for U$110,000 by the British Library in 1984. There is now The Oxford Traherne project, a scholarly enterprise that intends to publish the first tranche of 15 volumes in 2024, even as everyone expects more manuscripts to show up. Traherne’s radical theology centres on the purpose of life being what he calls felicity, or as we would say happiness. He writes copiously about our end being felicity, to a very religious woman living in Herefordshire, by name Mrs. Susanna Hopton née Harvey (1627-1709), someone who was at different times an Anglican, a Roman Catholic, and a friend of Nonjurors, such was the turbulence of social change. When she presented one of Thomas’s manuscripts for publication after his death, Susanna overlooked to mention its author, with the result the book was published under her name, not his. Traherne’s main message is that love is all and worldly things are just so many tennis balls. C.S. Lewis wrote that ‘Centuries of Meditations’ is “almost the most beautiful book in the English language.” This obscure but ultimately felicitous course of events was on my mind while reading about Filippo Bernardini (born ca. 1993). He is the person working for Simon & Schuster London who has been accused of creating multiple fake internet domains and misleading email addresses in order to secure unpublished manuscripts from well-known authors, defrauding by impersonation. Why anyone would indulge in such a phishing scam remains to be seen; doubtless Filippo has his own story, which may further test credulity now that he’s under arrest and has to have his own official version. So many tennis balls. “The safeguarding of our authors’ intellectual property is of primary importance,” the publisher’s spokesperson said. That Thomas Traherne’s writing was his property seems not to have been of much meaning to him, his family, or friends. His brother Philip rewrote many of the poems after Thomas’s death, in a style more fitting of emerging tastes in verse. Mrs. Hopton, the person being addressed in ‘Centuries of Meditations’, treated them as good handouts for her spiritual reading circle, but seems to have taken the matter no further. Libraries in all likelihood hold more of Thomas Traherne in their property, awaiting the day when an unsigned manuscript surfaces.

Epiphany

 

Wisdom, wherever it comes from and however it wins, knows to play at times the game of gesture. If you must give something to someone of highest value, give gold. Even kings do not sniff at that. This substance will not lose its favour on the bedposts overnight. Even if gold can only imitate the sunlight shining in the flowing water, the millions of leaves that yesterday were green and tomorrow will be shrivelled black on the ground. Even if gold is inedible and can never replace loaves coming out of the ovens in a night kitchen. Even if gold can buy everything that looks, sounds, smells, tastes and feels like happiness, but will have to be traded in at reduced cost, sometime, back there in the good old days. Gold is no substitute for the blood in people’s veins, the shapely mysteries of the body, the clarity of consciousness. Wisdom venerates wisdom. Wisdom gives back seventy times seven, long after the gold gift finds its way into a display case in the museum of ancient history. One of Herod’s little toys, left behind when wisdom went where wisdom goes next. Always on its mettle. Or out on some backroad without a signpost. Wisdom, whenever it happens and whoever it speaks to, is ordinary stuff. It makes no great show of its own knowledge. Its lack of pretension is humbling to the average person of pretension. As ordinary as incense, that is no more than a stick and mud, stuck in mud, that burning makes a fume rippling up into space, and a scent that soothes the tired head. Shit mud, or the ooze from a tree that frankly no one’s paying much attention to, as they frolic after fantasy, or gorge on glamour, or believe in others’ captive lies. Dried ooze that glowing hot sends out lines, like a continuous prayer, nothing but the truth, quiet as you like, even on a windy day, or when it’s snowing like in a Christmas card. Incense, that is nothing to write home about, but that people keep a bundle of for special occasions. Wisdom, whether or not it has any palpable use, will admit of dying. Who knows, people sort through every kind of epiphany to find an explanation for that one. Click their fingers, as if the answer will appear like magic. Or, wishfully, sink their shares into death disappearing, preferably forever. Think, if they snap freeze the epiphany will happen in their next life, because it’s sure not happening in this one. Yet it has already started. It is starting now. People’s bodies can scarcely guess what might happen next. Their hands fill quotebooks more and more, their lifetime of myrrh. Whereas wisdom, for reasons that seem to change meaning over a lifetime, would have death be a gift. As if this were the only way forward, handed out from the start. Here also is where the body must be cared for, even people’s lifetimes are the body caring all the time for the bearer. At the start, wisdom is given gifts, then enters into the classroom to learn the whole thing again, at the most personal level, seventy times seven.

Iconic

Herewith, the iconic rant. Destined to become iconic in a short while, perhaps overnight. In the course of a day this ranter has read about a recently departed bit part American actor who is, for this reason, iconic; a particular foodstuff brand (sauerkraut) that’s iconic; a gin and tonic, iconic. In need of a superlative? Does the word ‘great’ feel not so great? When in doubt, or else fails, reach for iconic. Everyone else does. It is therefore with some relief that this ranter reads an article by an esteemed, but so far not iconic, sub-editor to the effect that use of the word ‘iconic’ has for some time now been regarded by her as meaningless. She means it’s lost its meaning. Some words lose their force through rampant overuse. Such is the fate of iconic. On social media today a photographer posted a picture, with his back to the cathedral entrance, of two ‘Melbourne icons’: Young & Jackson’s Hotel and an imposing nose of tram. The years of civilised culture wars that ended with an actual icon being installed in the cathedral itself is not alluded to. Ironic is not something associated with users of iconic. Nor are they intending to be comic using iconic, generally speaking. Google ‘cathedral icon’ and the first hit is an icon company offering 2,142 downloadable cathedral pictograms, that is hyperlinks and mouse short cuts. Duomo di Milano reduces to a few lines and oblongs. Narrow the search to find an actual eikon. Why iconic?, I hear you cry, if only in this ranter’s head, his inner prompt for further speeches. The word has come to define anything that is thought representative of something, anything really. It seems to be a synonym for famous. Bluestone lanes, for example, are iconic Melbourne, but not bitumen roads, which comprise the majority of sealed thoroughfares in the metropolis. It all gets a bit subjective after someone says, red dirt tracks are iconic. And what about Lygon Street? What about it? Then we have the uncoordinated splatterfest known as (bluestone) Hosier Lane, cited as the example of iconic Melbourne graffiti only because of the tourism. Connections between money and ‘iconic’ deserve more considered study than an unrepressed rant. Usage is forever putting undisclosed money amounts on that which is suddenly iconic. The aforementioned sub-editor “once edited out three appearances of ‘iconic’ on a single day: ‘unforgettable’, ‘infamous’ and ‘emblematic’ stepped in admirably.” In the interests of better communication, here are some more synonyms for your use, in order of iconic status: seminal, awe-inspiring, epochal, supreme, archetypical, ideal, evocative, exemplary, capital, paradigmatic, symbolical. One online site has 407 synonyms for iconic. It’s easy to find. This rant only scratches the surface of icon. But am I talking to myself? Are all rants circular, even or especially iconic rants? I stop talking to the sink and gaze out the laundry window at the iconic paling fence and the iconic jacaranda and the iconic Australian sunlight with the feeling it’s all a bit of a lost cause. An emblematic lost cause. Typical, almost.

Source:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/01/different-from-is-correct-and-iconic-is-meaningless-what-i-know-after-two-decades-as-a-subeditor

 

Péefko

I remember Jiri Tibor Novak. In conversation, when I named a person or thing that caught his attention, he would repeat that name or thing, then give a small disquisition about said person or subject. He confirmed a shared interest and extended our mental image. He sat at the long kitchen table with homemade coffee. He wanted to know what people made with their hands. He wanted to know not what they were thinking in passing, the usual thing, but their own thought. JTN sent new year’s cards with his initials. They were Czech péefko (PF), a Bohemian Christmas-New Year custom derived from the French ‘pour féliciter’ (felicitations). It is with this in mind that I ponder the poignancy (if that’s the word) of him dying between Christmas and New Year. I had not seen him for a few years, so the news was an unhappy surprise. I wished I’d visited him lately. I have a collection of PFs. Years ago he invited several poets to write about ladders. Poems are ladders, especially quatrains where each pause is a rung. We scale down them, then climb slowly up again, checking the more interesting or unusual views. I sent twelve ladder poems, I like writing cycles, but JTN’s ladder project never took off and we never raised the subject again. Ladders were one of his vehicles. Others were tents, flowerpots, boats, caravans, sandcastles, birds, chrysanthemums. They betokened connections between the two big worlds of his world, well summarised by the poet Jan Pieklo as his “toy Prague bush house/ near Vaclavske Namesti/ in Angahook Lorne State Park/ of Victoria.” Vaclav, or Wenceslaus, is the same Wenceslaus of the carol sung each Christmas. After 1983, JTN installed a sealed room in his bush house to protect his artworks from more bushfires. He kept dozens of notebooks and sketchbooks. He made many kinds of handwriting. He put me on to Bohumil Hrabal, for which I am annually grateful. He loved Maurice Sendak and would have enjoyed the valedictory ‘My Brother’s Book’: “While Guy wheeled round in the steep air/ A crescent in the sky,/ Passing worlds at every plunge-/ Dropping down and down/ On soft Bohemia.” That landlocked land is many passing worlds from the Great Ocean Road, with its ever-present strait of blue on one side of the motional car. Lighthouses were another of JTN’s constant vehicles. There are many of his paintings, prints, and drawings in our house. There is a set of five of his boat prints, set somewhere off the coastline: inkwell boat, semicolon boat, fire boat, hillside town boat, angel wing boat. The painting everyone sees upon entering the front door is one of his caravans, at rest after many journeys. The hillside painting on the caravan could be Prague or it could be the Otways.